Designs and Implementations in Neural Network-based Video Coding

TL;DR

This paper discusses recent neural network-based video coding techniques, specifically intra prediction and in-loop filtering, which have been integrated into the JVET reference software, achieving significant compression efficiency improvements.

Contribution

The paper presents the integration and evaluation of neural network-based intra prediction and in-loop filtering in JVET's video coding framework, demonstrating notable BD-rate reductions.

Findings

Achieved up to 23% BD-rate reduction in various configurations.

Validated effectiveness of NN-based intra prediction and filtering.

Enhanced video compression performance over traditional methods.

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the huge success of deep learning in well-known artificial intelligence applications such as face recognition, autonomous driving, and large language model like ChatGPT. Recently, the application of deep learning has been extended to a much wider range, with neural network-based video coding being one of them. Neural network-based video coding can be performed at two different levels: embedding neural network-based (NN-based) coding tools into a classical video compression framework or building the entire compression framework upon neural networks. This paper elaborates some of the recent exploration efforts of JVET (Joint Video Experts Team of ITU-T SG 16 WP 3 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC29) in the name of neural network-based video coding (NNVC), falling in the former category. Specifically, this paper discusses two major NN-based video coding technologies, i.e. neural network-based intra prediction and neural network-based in-loop filtering, which have been investigated for several meeting cycles in JVET and finally adopted into the reference software of NNVC. Extensive experiments on top of the NNVC have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Compared with VTM-11.0_nnvc, the proposed NN-based coding tools in NNVC-4.0 could achieve {11.94%, 21.86%, 22.59%}, {9.18%, 19.76%, 20.92%}, and {10.63%, 21.56%, 23.02%} BD-rate reductions on average for {Y, Cb, Cr} under random-access, low-delay, and all-intra configurations respectively.